“Hire a strapping young man, while the two of you are making love have the young man wave a towel over you. That will help the wife fantasize and should bring on an orgasm.”

They go home and follow the rabbi’s advice. They hire a handsome young man and he waves a towel over them as they make love. It doesn’t help and she is still unsatisfied.

Perplexed, they go back to the rabbi. “Okay,” says the rabbi to the husband, lets try it reversed. Have the young man make love to your wife and you wave the towel over them.” Once again they follow the rabbi’s advice.

The young man gets into bed with the wife, and the husband waves the towel. The young man gets to work with great enthusiasm and the wife soon has an enormous, room-shaking, screaming orgasm.

The husband smiles, looks at the young man and says to him triumphantly,  “Schmuck, that’s the way you wave a towel!”

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy—Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, brilliantly matches philosophical principles with relevant jokes. Here Cathcart and Klein amusingly explain the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the mistaken assumption that because one event follows another, the first caused the second.

Cathcart and Klein do an excellent job describing ten major philosophical fields, including Metaphysics, Logic, Epistemology, and Ethics, but they don’t do much more than that. In this way, the subtitle of the book, Understanding Philosophy—Through Jokes, is a bit misleading. This book is not really an educational experience as much as it is an entertaining or amusing one. After each philosophical idea is presented, the authors write a joke that they believe encompasses the previous concept.

In their subchapter on Deductive Logic, they tell this joke:

An old cowboy goes into a bar and orders a drink. As he sits there sipping his whiskey, a young lady sits down next to him. She turns to the cowboy and asks him, “Are you a real cowboy?”

He replies, “Well, I’ve spent my whole life on the ranch, herding horses, mending fences, and branding cattle, so I guess I am.”

She says, “I’m a lesbian. I spend my whole day thinking about women. As soon as I get up in the morning, I think about women. When I shower or watch TV, everything seems to make me think of women.”

A little while later, a couple sits down next to the old cowboy and asks him, “Are you a real cowboy?”

He replies, I always thought I was, but I just found out I’m a lesbian.

Even without an explanation you were probably understood the joke and laughed at the punch line. This is because in actuality it requires not philosophical principles but only the most basic common sense to understand. Although the average person may not be able to explain the comedy of the situation in such deliberate philosophical terms as the authors of the book, they would undoubtedly be able to recognize the humor.

Cathcart and Klein intend to capitalize on the humor of a situation that can arise when a person bases an argument on a false premise. In the situation with the old and confused cowboy, he reasons to the same conclusion that the lesbian does, however, in his case, the premise ‘I am a woman’ is really false.

In this way, Cathcart and Klein do not really teach the reader philosophy. What they are really doing is pointing out the philosophy of certain situations their readers may come across. By identifying the philosophical terms necessary to explain an occurrence, they impart the necessary knowledge to classify their experiences and ideas into the different fields of philosophy that they already understand on the most superficial level. This basic understanding is intuitive and cannot really be taught in a book. However, just like the enlightened cowboy turned lesbian, this book can open up a reader’s eyes to the everyday relevance of philosophical principles.